Transgender trailblazer narrowly lost in B.C. election, but vows to continue her activism

As Morgane Oger sits on a sunny café patio, several passersby wave hello or offer condolences to the rookie NDP candidate, who narrowly lost the Vancouver-False Creek riding to a high-profile Liberal incumbent in the May 9 provincial election.

This friendly banter on the patio would have been hard for Oger to imagine four years ago, when the 45-year-old IT consultant and father of two young children took the daunting step of beginning to live as the gender she has always felt: female. While she received support from some, she faced intolerance from many others.

“In 2013, all evidence was showing me that I would be discriminated against violently for the rest of my life, and that I was making a very bad choice to come out, and that I was committing career suicide, and that I was really going to struggle,” Oger said in a recent interview.

“I could never have imagined, in 2017, that people would really believe in what I’m doing.”

When Oger transitioned, she was concerned for the well-being of her son and daughter, both under the age of six, and did not intend to become a public face of the trans human rights movement. She became an accidental activist when, after speaking at a Vancouver school board meeting about sexual orientation and gender identity policies in schools, she was asked by a journalist to further discuss her views.

Her voice was quiet at first, but as she consented to more interviews she discovered her message was being heard. Over the next three years, her voice would become much louder: she lobbied the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for gender references to be dropped from birth certificates; helped with the fight to expand protection for transgender people under the B.C. Human Rights Code; provided comment on Bill C-16, to ban discrimination of gender identity and expression under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and travelled to Ottawa to speak about the proposed changes.

With these accomplishments, though, she became a target for those against such moves. A Conservative senator opposed to Bill C-16 told an unflattering story about her (without using her name) in the Senate, and a website disparaged her identity and beliefs.

In the past few months, her activism work — and her personal journey with her own gender — has been thrust onto an even more public stage as she campaigned to become an NDP MLA in B.C. She would have become the first transgender MLA in the province.

“It was a terribly difficult decision (to run for politics). … I agonized over it,” said Oger, a University of B.C. mechanical engineering graduate and owner of an IT business that serves the high-tech sector. “I had to face my own fears: Am I credible enough to run for office, or am I just fooling myself?”

Her face flashed repeatedly on TV screens on election night as the first-time NDP candidate, given little chance or resources to win the historically safe Liberal riding of Vancouver-False Creek, nearly toppled incumbent Sam Sullivan. The lead see-sawed dramatically all night, and in the end Sullivan squeaked ahead by 415 ballots — just two per cent of the votes cast. It was one of the closest races in the province, an unexpected surprise since Sullivan won by more than 3,000 ballots in 2013.

For Oger, 49, the loss was both heartbreaking and a victory. Despite relatively few donations or political organizers, she nearly defeated a former Vancouver mayor and believes she established herself as a “credible” candidate with better odds to win in the next election. She also, arguably, has a more solid podium from which to lobby for social policy changes.

Morgane Oger in Ottawa in May 2016, where she lobbied in support of Bill C-16, introduced by the Liberals to protect gender identity and expression in human rights law.Handout /
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Although it is 2017 and much has been accomplished, there is still more work to be done, said Randall Garrison, NDP MP for Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke and the party’s critic for LGTBQ concerns.

The federal NDP has been trying for 12 years to change the Canadian Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against gender identity and expression, and Oger is one of several transgender people who helped with the wording of the proposed legislation. After the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the federal Liberals introduced Bill C-16, which Garrison hopes will finally pass in the next three weeks. If that happens, the work of people like Oger will still be crucial, he said, to get businesses and government agencies to abide by the new rules.

Randall Garrison, NDP MP for Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke and the party’s critic for LGTBQ concerns, with B.C. provincial NDP Leader John Horgan at the 2016 Victoria Pride Parade. Garrison tried to recruit Oger to run for the federal party.handout /
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Garrison met Oger two years ago, when his party tried to recruit her to run federally.

“We felt her community activism, not just about transgender issues, but her parent activism on schools and also her views on (affordable) housing, would make her a good federal candidate. Unfortunately, she chose to run provincially,” he said.

Oger, as chair of Vancouver’s District Parent Advisory Council, has been lobbying to reverse the school district’s decision to cut the number of the popular French immersion spaces and trying to find out when the city’s fired trustees will be back on the job, now that the NDP and Greens appear poised to form government. The Vancouver school district is in disarray at the moment, with the superintendent having just resigned and the oft-disputed budget unlikely to be finalized soon because of the political uncertainty in Victoria.

The parent advisory council’s work is crucial right now, she argued, as it “is the only elected champion parents in Vancouver have, because the (trustees) are gone.”

Last week, Oger also fired off an impassioned email to Vancouver police, accusing the force of being too slow to implement anti-discrimination policies for transgender people, which the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered two years ago after the VPD’s mistreatment of a transgender woman, Angela Dawson.

“They are delaying,” fumed Oger. Vancouver police did not respond to a request for comment.

Officers are scheduled to march again in the Aug. 6 Pride Parade, after Black Lives Matter Vancouver asked the VPD last year to voluntarily withdraw because the presence of uniforms made some minority groups feel unsafe. Some still consider police participation in the parade to be controversial, despite the compromise that most officers will be out of uniform and there will be no marked vehicles.

Oger, as chair of the advocacy group Trans Alliance Society and a member of the parade selection committee, initially backed police participation as a move toward reconciliation, but informed the force last week that she will withdraw that support unless the new anti-discrimination policies are implemented.

“Maybe they should live up to their side of the deal, and make us feel at home next to them,” said Oger, who was the parade’s grand marshal last year.

Advocacy is in Oger’s blood. Her grandfather, a doctor in France in the 1950s, angered the Catholic Church by refusing to sign an anti-abortion pledge. Two decades ago, from her home in Switzerland where she worked in IT for Goldman Sachs, Oger quietly ran a website that allowed RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan) to post surreptitious videos of the mistreatment of women.

At the heart of her most recent activism is coming to terms with her own gender. After 45 years of living as a man named Ronan, she became Morgane — the baby-girl name her mother had picked out while pregnant.

Part of the inspiration for her middle-aged transition, Oger said, was to live up to the lessons she was teaching her kids about being honest and true to themselves. “I was keeping a fundamental part of my identity from them. … I was having a crisis where I could not stand telling a half truth to my children.”

Revealing this to her partner, the mother of her children, was very difficult, and the couple separated. With her son and daughter, she spent several months preparing them, slowly using simple terms to explore the concept of gender identity.

She started by explaining that “in a little bit of my heart I feel like a girl.”

Later, she told her children she was “mostly a girl.”

Eventually, she confided in them: “Actually, I’m a girl and everybody thinks I’m a boy. And I don’t want to be like that anymore. I want to live like who I am.”

Initially, Oger feared she would lose access to her children, now aged 9 and 10, but she has remained an active co-parent. Later, she worried about how they would be affected by her decision to run in the provincial election.

“I was much more worried about what would happen to my children — my children’s safety and privacy. You worry about safety when you put yourself in the public eye like this,” she said.

Indeed, she was dogged by a rumour mill that questioned her role as a parent and by a man who distributed hate flyers in her riding, a tactic condemned by her political opponents.

“People had tried to use my identity against me a number of times and I was fairly certain that the worst possible thing that could be said about me had already been said when it comes to me being transgender. Strangely enough, people came up with new things, which were shocking,” said Oger, who also sits on Vancouver city hall’s LGBTQ2+ advisory committee.

“I had to tell my children about the bad people who do bad things. … You live with the dread that this could have a negative impact on your children. You pray that it doesn’t,” she said. “Still, people who would stop our equality are a very loud but very small minority.”

Todd Hauptman was the campaign manager for Morgane Oger’s close defeat in the May provincial election. He said most people were more interested in her views on major issues than the fact she is a transgender person.Belle Ancell /
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On the doorsteps, said her campaign manager, Todd Hauptman, voters were more interested in Oger’s stand on key election issues.

“With Morgane’s campaign, besides that hate flyer, the majority of people in the riding wanted to know where she stood on the issues. The fact that she was transgender was a factor in her campaign but not a deciding factor.”

In a riding written off by most as a Liberal stronghold, he said, Oger attracted a team of grassroots, newbie volunteers that wanted to help get her elected because she was known to be a hardworking advocate.

“And we defied everybody’s expectations,” added Hauptman, who managed the campaign of a Liberal cabinet member in 2013.

Hauptman, who is gay, said he found more support working for Oger’s campaign, and believes her success at the ballot box indicates society is increasingly more focused on candidates’ beliefs than their personal lives.

“I hope that Morgane’s campaign shows that you can run as a transgender candidate and you can have a fighting shot,” he said.

Last November, Oger became the first transgender candidate to win a nomination for a major political party in B.C. Later, three more transgender candidates filed papers to run, one for the Liberals and two for the Green party; all three placed third in their ridings.

Oger plans to run for political office again, and she hopes there will be even less of a “soap opera” focus on her personal life.

In the meantime, she will continue running her IT business and a small marina that she owns, as well as advocating education improvements and promoting gender equality. Her beloved Bill C-16 is being stalled in the Senate by some Conservative senators, and the Tories’ newly elected leader, Andrew Scheer, has voted against the legislation.

“There is something wrong when that happens. So, we are not quite there yet,” she says with a determined smile.